FOR THE RECORD

Rachel nails both big oil and government safety concerns in one swell foop. She also brought national attention to the untended indifference of their merely announcing the miles of boom deployed with no intention of making it work.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

HOW DARE I?

How dare I not only desire to maintain my life but to enjoy it? Maintaining life entails protecting it against predators, diseases, competitors and fatal acts of nature; those things that would end it. Enjoying life entails consciously evolving the experiential wisdom to better assess events as they exist, irrelevant to any purpose with which one might intend to access them.

When I first began my graphics business I gave it the slogan “dare to be happy” when I realized what a challenge it was to remain happy in the public face of gloom painted in pixels of individual faces drained of brighter possibilities as they wrestled with the daily demands of a past traded in for a promise.

This “happy” I dare to be can be thought of as the intrinsic energy of the being I always am, from birth to my inevitable death. Daring the happy being to manifest itself in events is a matter of realizing benefit results only from the generosity of a happy being — all else entails new debt.

The challenge is in remaining aware of this ample energy while daily dealing within a society constantly being conditioned to atone for multiple inadequacies from original sin to acne by authorities damning the naturally happy individual variation of the human genome we cannot help but be at our deepest core, no matter how buried under guilt and almost forgotten our own energy may be.

The belief that happiness is a carrot on a stick, to be earned to be deserved, is the western civilization version of the middle-eastern, “Man is riding a camel in search of a camel.”

Photos by Heather Knight, my daughter

HELPING

We couldn’t help but know. We were looking in all the holes in their pods and even had mobile agents inside. It was a brilliant plan.

We’d known about them since before the bristle cone pine was a seedling. Like all the rootless ones, they had to actually touch each other to reproduce. Like all the rooted ones, we appreciated their proliferation of our reproduction through postprandial perambulations across the entire intersphere.

About 3.5 degrees ago, there appeared among the rootless ones an upright, relatively hairless kind of nursing being, totally unique in the 15 orbits since the birth of the intersphere. For the first time a kind of being began manipulating other beings for more than life sustaining food. They mutated large areas of the intersphere without considering the well being of the lives they sacrificed for their own greedy convenience.

Such convenience snowballed exponentially until the increase in population around such nodes could no longer sustain life. They devised isolation pods, both permanent and mobile, within which to survive their own poisonous excesses spewed into the atmosphere. It appeared this latest world leading civilization had become sufficiently advanced technologically and narrow minded enough in their greedy purpose to set the life of the intersphere back at least 11 orbits.

Having spawned from the same matter as the rest of the intersphere, they eventually manifested their genetic tendency towards symbiotic balance by creating a hardwire system of transmitters and receivers of airborne signals just to mediate their isolated loneliness. Since it was so like the organic intersphere from which they’d isolated themselves, it was no surprise they called it the internet.

For the first twenty orbits of the intersphere around its food the internet served to expand technological and sociological exchanges at a phenomenal rate until it just couldn't keep up with the growing demand. We also noticed the dwindling ratio of rootless beings touching each other for reproduction to those touching them selves unreproductively and thereby the birthrate among them fell as well.

It was too slow to avoid the obvious environmental crises their still overpopulated indulgences made inevitable unless the internet improved. We helped it along with free uninterrupted, high speed, hi res, instant reception by connecting it to the intersphere. It's been five hundred solar orbits now and today we’re are going to sever our connection, having successfully eliminated the genetic flaw that once caused beings to value the spectacle over direct experience with the nature from which they arose. The upright survivors are the progeny of those who were never fooled by the spectacle to begin with.

They sleep in our limbs and on our leaves … and are fully aware of the intersphere.

GETTING PRIORITIES STRAIGHT

When I stated there was nothing left for me “to do” in my last post it was in reference to action resulting in my gaining better symbiosis with my environment and personal relationship with loved ones. Its not that I couldn’t improve my responsibility further, but that having learned to see nature as it is needs no doing of maintenance beyond remaining aware of the glaring difference between such direct experience of my life and second hand information becoming more virtually realistic every day as every conversation seems to be an exchange of memes received from the electronic “real world” of western civilization.

The connection re-realized between my daughter and I last week has let me feel confident that we are one person in two places to the degree that information from her is as pure as my own sensory system supplies me. She is my eyes on the Mississippi Gulf Coast as she tells me of her son’s work captaining a boat for BP every day and the experience of the filth and fumes on his clothing now that globs of crude oil have reached the barrier islands off shore. I no longer have to wonder what is the truth about the reported disaster, the results have gotten beyond my mistrust of the media and are affecting my grandson’s health, no speculation to it.

My hip requires me to stop and regenerate if I walk as far as a quarter mile at a good clip. I would be no better than a glob of oil on the beach if I were to go there to try to help in a job that may require every able-bodied person in the country to actively participate in remedying the situation far more directly than holding hands and praying. Although I always thought it an ironic obviator of faith to the faithful, I’ve gotta agree that their “god helps them who help them selves.”

The Gulf of Mexico is the spawning ground for a giant portion of sea and shore life and the food supply for walking, hopping and flying life all over the planet. This blossoming vortex continuously unwinds its contents out into the larger Atlantic and the rest of the world; a slow motion version of Ice Nine, enough crude oil could kill us all. Whether you go alone or with a club, if you are able-bodied and care about planetary life I recommend an integrity check on your ability to respond in a directly effective way.

As indirect as it is, this blog is my best idea for calling for individuals to get their priorities straight about life on Earth. If you can find something more useful for me to do, don’t hesitate to let me know.

FINALLY, FATHER'S DAY

It feels as though my life has always had a direction based on overcoming the friction opposing my curiosity’s free will. Like the tail orients a kite, my concentration has been on reconciling a rift between my daughter and me by both working on myself and attempting to communicate with her at different stages throughout the 38 years of separation. Each failure was like tying another bow on the tail threatening to drag the kite down unless the wind of my desire strengthened.

Sometimes physical metaphors don’t do justice to spiritual phenomena. For the past three days Heather has sat beside me as we hung out in my little Dawgranch haven as if the past was a figment of both our imaginations. Any idea of forgiveness or atonement or injury or righteousness dissolved upon our initial embrace and we were as we were when she was a child.

I’m not sure if there is anything left for me “to do” in this life. I have only the will, but not the capacity to move western civilization toward a more symbiotic relationship with nature. So I think I’ll just let experience wash over me without filtering it for clues to my imaginary discomforts for a while and see how that works out.

ATTITUDES OF OWNERSHIP

Synapses stretched like piano wire between nodes of knowing nature as free as it is and points of perceiving the suffering man’s usury has wrought upon it all, I strain to speak the simple truth about the origins of atrocious war but words mean far too many things to be so clear.

There is nothing I have learned that can spare anyone the experience required to learn it for oneself. The closest I can imagine anyone coming is through metaphor poignant enough to remind one of the already known in genetic or experiential memory.

The history of the biological evolution of homo sapiens sapiens is replayed in the gestation of the quickening egg. The history of the western civilization’s evolution is replayed by enforced education in the local culture like molten matter injected into molds spewing multiple, invulnerable action figures varying around the theme of entitlement to all-you-can-eat-and-take-home-for-later.

By enacting such god granted stewardship with our attitudes of ownership we have abandoned hunting and gathering to take up assembly lines of crops and crappy crutches for crippled capacities to do anything but serve or be served wherever we sit, consuming and disposing in front of the silvery screen spectacle of the “real world” produced for our protection, our mental prophylactic against direct contact with the natural world.

It’s not like we’re living like there’s no tomorrow. Western civilization believes in tomorrow so much it ignores the present, right at our feet; the only place anything ever happens. While death to an entire ecosystem pours out of a gaping wound in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, the criminals and the police piss away the emergency of the still ongoing crime arguing the specific ownership of guilt and reparations to be settled sometime in the theoretical, non existent future. Had he been a CEO of US or BP, the Dutchman that saved the dike would have failed miserably, having no fingers not pointed at everyone but himself.

Efforts to stop the flow are stragedies of the worst humor and the antiquated cleanup technologies are inadequately deployed in a toxic atmosphere being underestimated by the same department who sent first responders to respiratory hell during the 9/11 cleanup. My grandson missed a trip to visit me with his mother today so he could stay home and captain one of the cleanup boats off the Mississippi coast. Heather, my dear Lilwave, says they haven’t noticed any peculiar odors there in Pascagoula, but, I gotta say, anyone who can live in the already toxic atmosphere of that little burg has foregone any claim to olfactory discrimination. They sarcastically refer to it as the smell of money. Oh, yeah. The real world where everything is ours to have.

BUSTED

Printing was to the bible what the internet is to politics. When the infallible word of the creator was made manifest, to be devoured by candlelight in the hovels of the more common folk, the patchwork quilt of a story, originally told to keep the clergy on the same page as they paraphrased purity from the pulpits, became shredded like a pig in piranhas. And the miracle was that each variety of bite taken remained infallible when digested and shat, despite the contradictory odors of the piles. Ah, certainty, such a relief from thinking. Don’t like the infallible, fine. Make up your own version and call that the truth, “… so help you god”. Ever notice that, no matter how personally individual one’s variety of belief in the same brand may be, faith requires all others to be wrong and on the road to hell. Such an outlook has made hell of living on the natural heaven this Eden of a planet is within the environs of the Gomorrah of western civilization, just to put it in biblical terms.

There also occurred across the land a falling away from the entire guilt trip the church had been laying on the faithful for the past fifteen hundred years as the more perceptive recognized the book to be a sales guide/brochure cobbled together from selected legends and myths five hundred years after the “fact” of the hero’s existence. Among them there formed two camps, the atheists who rejected the existence of a controlling spirit in a curious, chaotic world and the exploiters who began using the mechanisms of faith in the myth to pose as earthly authority over the material portion of humans no matter what they believed about god. Along with being unable to enter heaven without god we’re now unable to enter life without papers from earthly authority.

The internet fact checked John McCain out of contention. The internet is fact checking Barack Obama’s campaign promises into lies, just like every other shill for the shadowy shilling that’s come down the pike.

The disaster of this oil spill exposes nature to a blow the entire world will suffer for generations. While helping set booms in the gulf individual volunteers were searched in a cull for illegal immigrants by ICE; such meticulous attention to irrelevant detail. While leaving the inevitable overreach of greedy technology being operated by bean counters to gush billions of gallons of suffocating, poisonous crude oil into the heart of a planetary life blossom endlessly cycling her contents out among the continents, the responsible, real criminals, their overseers and the government elected to oversee the overseers have all been found to be one not-so-clandestine corporation. The shock and dismay. Bad oil companies. Bad government. They made us spend half our income on prosthetics only aliens to earth would consider necessities for life — within the Borg ship as it rapes and shits on the planet.

My previous video post, If Cursing Makes You Feel Better …, featured the lack of any real concern about the cleanup of the oil spill, even with the antiquated inadequate boom technology to harness surface slicks. Rachel Maddow either saw the video or picked up on the same glaring lack of concern on her investigative journey to the barrier islands off Louisiana and has taken it national.

Without waiting for Obama or any other blameworthy irresponsibility to give the orders, responsible, fit individuals should charter buses, catch trains, head for the most imperiled part of the gulf coast, don hazmat gear and begin proper booming and skimming. Full disclosure: I am not going to the coast-my lack of strength and stamina would only be in the way. There are technologies of absorption (aerogel) and separation (Costner’s Centrifuge) finally being given the green light, but the oil is reaching the wetlands now. BP get out of our way, there’s a revolution going on.

Or ought to be.

IN A GARDEN OR A VASE?

“Lived here all your life?”

“Not, yet.”

As open to sharing my love now as I have been at any time in my life so far, I feel fairly certain I shall never meet another person for whom I could feel such a complete love as I shared with Mary Gardner.

She was a bartender and I was a drinker. She was twenty and I was forty. She was the wisest person I'd ever met and I was an eager disciple. When it became apparent that we couldn’t get enough of each other in the bloom of new love’s discoveries about each other and the oneness we formed she gave me a book by Jorge Amado, Gabriella: Cinnamon and Cloves. The message of her gift I took from the situation wherein our heroine, Gabriella, is the best thing to ever happen to the cash register at Nacib’s bar.

Her beauty and lively warmth kept the seats and standing room full of his jealous and admiring friends, business was good. Nacib and Gabriella were in love and their mood had much to do with the respect with which his friends flirted with her and how safe that made her feel to flirt freely in return. It was win-win for everyone.

Beautiful story short: they got married, mood changes, business fell off, acrimony, misery —— Nacib consults his oldest friend who asks him to consider, “Which is more beautiful, a flower in a garden or a vase?” The simple metaphor was so powerful it may have had the effect of a self fulfilling prophecy on me in that, when Mary left to attend art school in Atlanta, I cried over the broken vase in a shameful display of attachment rather than be glad for her return to the garden of her natural habitat.

This post is inspired by the realization that this metaphor also applies to the threshold between the beauty of humans and the effect of putting their blooming evolution in the terminal isolation of the vase of civilization like some sort of Petri dish purpose cooked up by people who did not bother to understand that with which they fucked. Public education is a self-replicating pottery shed with no garden in sight.

I’ve missed Mary for thirty years now, glimpses of human beauty come and go with the vapors from the vase.

Like the tide follows the moon,
My spirits rose and fell
With the corners of your mouth.

Tearing the hook from my heart
I threw you back to the sea
To see you better reflect the sun.

You’re so unique —
Nothing reminds me of you
But what you've touched.

You've touched me
And my eyes see everything.

There is nowhere you aren’t.
You’re inside me
And I sail everywhere.

•

This is a reprint from my otherblog, dualiytilaud, as I bring it to a close

JUST A LITTLE WHILE AGO…

Me and Mabe and Homer were sitting around Mabe’s front porch enjoying the changing angle of the shadows of the early morning Earth turn, sipping coffee and passing the pipe.

The dogs were either lying around calmly soaking up rays, scratching their back with their feet up in the air or sparring with each other in celebration of such a beautiful dawning day.

A hen announces her proud accomplishment from her nest while her sisters devour some crumbled corn tortillas at our feet gossiping in quiet purring clucks only they understand.

Small birds nervously drop down to the chicken feed cast in the yard, relying on their fellows in the trees to warn them of the cat. The cat, in his new, improved, tail-down stealth stalk, approaches from the direction with the tallest grass, still unaware of the lookouts above. Although I keep his bowl full and he has yet to even get close to catching a bird, his instincts demand he try just for the sport of it all. A grackle joins the game by flying directly at him a mere three inches higher than the crouching cat’s vertical, claw extended paws outstretched explosion a good six feet straight up.

The chickens, cat and small dogs run for cover when the giant red hawk’s shadow stains their open play ground while the big dogs chase the dark spot in hopes the hawk will come down close enough to pluck out of the air as they have several panicked chickens and a peacock.

Sparky, the bass player in his and Homer's band, the Cramdens, let’s himself in through the gate across the road to here and is greeted by all the dogs. As he strolls through the dappled light beneath the trees, a thought of Kurt Vonnegut’s uncle’s mentioning paradise whenever he recognizes he’s in it let’s itself into my consciousness of now and is greeted by Homer, saying, “You know? There’s a lotta people in this world that would commit suicide if they had to live like we've learned to.”

It was the first time I ever laughed at one of Homer’s jokes.

I still am

•

Addendum: There seems to be some question as to this description of a day on the porch having any application to reaching the summit. Other than actually climbing a mountain, all summits to be reached are ideals in metaphor. Pisces Iscariot got it so well he suggested using "un-learned" for the striving to reach the summit I speak of, since he knows, as I do, that it is our introductory education into the spectacle and faith in the authority of its mythology that must be questioned to reach a life more symbiotic with the nature of the planet whose dependent cells we all are by realizing how belief in man's ownership of it all increases our destructive usury every day. The invisible prison is insidious.

Where do you grab a naked man? — Awestun, Tejas circa 1978, UT Campus

I sometimes feel like this fellow who lost it in public trying to get through the walls to let the civilized world know what beauty is being destroyed outside by it. Added 6/8/10